Confluence | where rivers meet

Confluence, a solo show of landscape-based original prints, was first shown at Zillah Bell Gallery, Thirsk, and again at LCB Depot, Leicester (2023).

It’s a considered, sustained and developed collection of printed works: monotypes, edition variables and limited edition etchings, including contemporary interventions in print. The collection responds to the River Derwent and its junction with connecting rivers, focussing on water as both precarious life source and exquisite manifestation of nature; the work explores and captures this historic stretch of the river’s navigation from source. 

To view available editions from the collection in person, please do get in touch.

For a period of time, lockdowns limited extended walks further upstream and deeper into the Peaks, but serendipitously provided focus for the artist to study the water as its journeyed close to the studio, travelling through the Derwent Valley Mills Unesco World Heritage Sites. An evolving body of etchings and monotypes responds to site and location, and is predominantly a lyrical conversation between printmaker and river. As such, this dialogue attempts to capture the fluidity and liquidity of water as it travels. When metal etching plates began to feel by their nature limited in allowing a response to an element that is constantly moving, the format and source of a concertina series of plates was born: a ‘rivertina’; these elongated, pleated etchings on paper, allow the printmaker a greater capacity to respond and express the form and journey of the water course.

Grappling with a language in print that could come any way close to expressing the shifting  movement of water and weather over this geographical stretch, the artist immersed herself in the poetic language of Alice Oswald, Oxford Professor of Poetry. This poet writes and performs her works on water, rivers and sea, so delicately, reverentially and powerfully that they form an aural waterscape and rhythm with which to work. The deep fathoms of Alice Oswald’s lexicon for water were somehow a lever for extracting and developing a language for water in print, as well as providing the titles for the works.

This printed language though, finds it hard to convey the artist’s deep-rooted heart for the health and life of our rivers and waters, particularly the Derwent as local water course. The fast declining state of the country’s rivers hastened this body of work and provoked a tension between the distant beauty of elemental riverscape, and the highly documented, reported, and known deterioration of water and life of our rivers.

Confluence, then, is a monochromatic body of work that is both a visual hymn to the river as well as a song of mourning.